Photographer Mark Klett speaks about his
lifelong love of Western landscapes in a soft baritone like
polished gravel. He talks about how his parents, who settled in New
York, traveled frequently to visit his mother’s family in
California, and about how, when he was young, he yearned to close
the distance between himself and the West.

NAME Mark Klett

VOCATION Photographer and
regents’ professor of art at Arizona State University

AGE 53

KNOWN FOR Documenting our changing
relationship with Western landscapes

HE
SAYS "Photos always seem to exist as sort of
stuffy, unnecessary antiques that we put in a drawer — unless
we take them out, put them in current dialogue, and give them
relevance."

Klett studied both science and art in college
in the East, and served briefly as a photographer for the U.S.
Geological Survey. It wasn’t long before he came West for
good, and began to use photography to tell the story of the land.

Klett’s work is rooted in the mid-1800s, the
"survey age" of the Western territories. While Manifest Destiny was
hitting its stride, the government and private interests financed
wide-ranging surveys of the land and resources of the West. The
resulting photographs whetted the nation’s appetite for
ranching, logging, mining and settlement. At the same time, the
photographers created an enduring record of the region.

"The large-scale exploration of the West coincided with vast
improvements in photographic technology," says Klett. "The opening
of the photographic record coincided neatly with our
‘discovery’ of the West." In the 1970s, Klett led an
ambitious effort to rephotograph more than 90 Western survey sites.
Though rephotography is almost as old as landscape photography
itself, it was long viewed as simply a technical tool; Klett and
his early collaborators were among the first to treat it as both a
science and an art.

The resulting book, Second
View, published in 1984, documented immense changes, some
of them surprising: Western cities had certainly expanded, but it
was the region’s supporting infrastructure — the
reservoirs, canals and pipelines — that left the broadest
mark on the landscape. "The biggest physical change in the West had
to do with water," says Klett.

Even so, some of his
rephotographs show that nature is on the mend: From 1860 to 1880,
for example, the Gould and Curry Mine in Virginia City, Nev., was a
teeming industrial site. All that remains now is a single road.

When Klett revisited these sites a second time in the
late 1990s, for a project he called Third Views, he found more
subtle changes. "There are more roads, and now there are cell
phones, so the West feels less remote," he says. "Even if the
physical space hasn’t changed much, it feels like it has, and
drastically."

For his latest book, Yosemite in
Time, Klett and his collaborators, writer Rebecca Solnit
and photographer Byron Wolfe, revisited Yosemite sites explored by
landscape photographers Eadweard Muybridge, Edward Weston, and
Ansel Adams between 1859 and 1937. Like biologist Joseph Grinnell,
these photographers have allowed modern Westerners to measure
changes in Yosemite’s mythic landscape.

Physical
change in Yosemite is often easy to capture on film: In some
places, for example, fire suppression has turned meadows into
forests. The photographs and text in Yosemite in Time also describe
the changing experiences of park visitors.

"The artists
who came before us found what they were looking for —
tangles, precipices, and dramas in Muybridge’s case ...
supernatural clarity in Adams’s," writes Solnit. "We too
found what we were looking for: a landscape full of photographs,
ghosts, shifts in vegetation, and other traces of passing time."

The traces of time continue to feed Klett’s
fascination with the Western landscape, even places he visits over
and over again. Each time he returns, he tries to look at these
places with new eyes, in hopes of finding something different. He
says: "That’s what artists do."